19 comments:

Patrick Joust is a 34-year-old reference librarian, born in Oroville, California, now living with his wife and son in Baltimore, where many of these pictures were made. In a recent interview with the magazine La Maison Wertn, Joust was asked why he often takes photos at night.

"Sometimes it’s just because the evenings are when I have time to do a lot of shooting, but beyond that, the night has always been fascinating to me. As a kid I seemed to hold on to a fear of the dark for longer than other kids my age, so perhaps that explains some of my interest now. I love noir and “neo-noir” movies too... The general atmosphere that can pervade almost any place at night opens up a lot of possibilities."

Which came first, the poem or the pictures? I see why you chose Patrick Joust; thanks for turning me on to him. I visited his other work to learn more about him and to see whether moods like this are all he chooses to convey. He's very, very talented and these pictures reach me in part (only in part) because living near Philadelphia, I see scenes like these regularly. New England aside (and Rhode Island doesn't look so different from my part of the East Coast; Boston and its suburbs do, however), this is my part of the world and I think that Joust presents a remarkable view of the Slide. I wonder whether he and I would agree about the reasons for it, but that's not terribly important when you're sliding out of control. Did you happen upon Joust's wife's terrific comic book-oriented blog about her teaching life in Baltimore -- Glitter Beneath The Rot? Fascinating, to me, that he's a reference librarian. I've seen reference librarians do all kinds of amazing extra-curricular things. Curtis

The Red Horse is a locally famous steakhouse in Frederick on what is called "The Golden Mile" the same golden mile of fast food restaurants and Home Depots and Wal Marts that exists in most towns of 20K, though the Red Horse pre-dates all of them and was once, but for two gas stations, the west end of Frederick, on Route 40 - I remember it as a six year old's landmark on trips to the Mon Valley to visit grandparents.

The poem came first, the experience was scary and compelling... too much of that lately.

Yes, as you've now seen, Joust has done interesting work in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as well as, obviously, in the Baltimore area.

Perhaps it's useful to consider his wife's comics blog and his photo blog as complementary projects, both in some sense traceable back to The Wire -- as is made plain by the choice of title for the comics blog.

andwe used to stop their on our way up to Harper's ferry and Charlestown, West 'By Gawd' Virginyugh.

My dad's side goes back into Bal'imore four generations..... Great Uncle Willie (Miller) had a combination grocery-licquor storelike the one in one of the photos.

there's more .... however, coffee and the mind's myths-as-historyawait....

(I remember sitting on the marble stoops/steps of my grandmother's mother's house in East Baltimore, long about when I was about 5 ( 1946) .... can "see" it-allas though it was this/here yesterday..... now.

Kurt Schmoke's Guardian article is fascinating and certainly the most literate and thoughtful piece of self-penned (which I'm sure it is) television criticism by a former politician I've ever read. I like the fact that he doesn't overload the article with optimism. Personally, seeing Philadelphia up close and anticipating the negative developments that await New York City, I feel none. It's like, I can tell you some fine and wonderful things about Philadelphia and mean them, but it would distort the real story of the place they call, with good reason, Killadelphia. But the city fathers and the permanent real government captured and relocated the Barnes Foundation collection, so God is still in their heaven. Curtis

Will get into all of this, but the Dick Swanson shots are amazing. Strangely, those were the (relatively speaking) good old days. The city has markedly deteriorated since that time. Superficially, some might point to the ghastly post-1973 skyline creation, which utterly despoiled the city's heritage (n.b., Philly's skyscrapers are certainly the ugliest and most mediocre architectural structure in any major American city) as a sign of life, but they would be misleading you. Every business meeting I attend is within a 4 square city block area and the rest of town (the University of Pennsylvania/Drexel U area somewhat excepted) is utterly no-man's-land-ville. After dark, Center City (the business meeting area near City Hall with its beautiful William Penn sculpture sitting atop the building) is like Gotham City in the Christopher Nolan Batman films. It's really, really horrible, depressing and a testament to depredations inherent in eternal one-political-party rule. People always think of the dreadful Mayor Frank Rizzo as a Republican because of his Nixon cum Agnew cum Gen. Curtis E. LeMay affect, but he was also a Democrat. We do have very, very good pizza, however, and cheesesteaks and hoagies that can't be beat or had elsewhere. I love that Randy Newman song. Curtis

Your poem stands, tall and frightening, alone, but the Patrick Joust photographs sure illustrate magnificently. Yes... blood on the sidewalk. Des Moines, 1986-87: some unknowns were gutting large dogs on the sidewalks in lovely residential neighborhoods... ho ho ho... the meat later (allegedly) served in a near-the-Drake-campus restaurant. Large dogs taken from backyards. Well-tended large dogs. One Drake faculty whiz made the local newspaper for acquiring and showing-off a guard goose. Yes... a goose in the window is worth.... And the rural is no less desperate-Americana.

We are not alone... the ghost-dogs and sacrificial-gooses are barking and honking all around us. Maybe it's this sharp northerly.

When the photographer says "The general atmosphere that can pervade almost any place at night opens up a lot of possibilities," I hear the voice of a man who is used to finding his inspiration on the Night Shift

That patch of sequencing required a sort of shift at that point, which accounts for the pink/red horse finding its way into the bluish tent of the night.

I had feared the possibly toxic fumes from the industrial stacks in the picture below might drift upward (as sort of percolation let us say), pick up minute chemical particles of dermal tissue substitute, and deposit those in such a way as to jeopardize the welfare of the pink/red horse.

Merely another of the uncalled for anxieties that accompany blindness; I hadn't at that point yet noted that the horse is made of plastic, and such a horse could probably endure anything short of WMDS, and even perhaps some of those, for limited periods.

About learning to forget, it's strange to admit that the one pop song line that has continued to most pester the mind, over the centuries, is "Learn to forget", in one of Jim Morrison's lyrics. There always seemed a ripe aporia lurking in the arras of that line.

Once one has managed to learn to forget, what happens the next time one needs to remember to learn to forget?

It's repeated four times as the refrain at the end of the second verse of Soul Kitchen.